A Smarter & Smoother Robot Arm

ABC News

This Could Be Big•November 29, 2011

If someone tells you that you move like a robot it's not a compliment, unless you're doing the dance, just ask Al Gore. Robots have always been famous for making very rigid and stiff movements and there's a reason for that. While it's simple for a human to move their hand from the keyboard, pick up a cup of coffee, take a sip and put it back down, it's extremely difficult to come up with an equation for a robot to do the same thing.

The task of making a robot move more naturally may have scared away others in the past, but researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Laboratory of Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) have attacked the dilemma head on. By combining two innovative Algorithms they have built a new robotic motion-planning system that calculates more efficient and human like paths for robot arms.

And what does all this mean? If robots are ever going to interact with humans it's critical that they're able to make efficient and predictable movements, which you can finally start to see with this system.